Tag: matt thompson

This October I’m spending three weekends in a row in bucolic, woodsy communities where few people live and fewer cell phone signals exist. At night the roads are pitch black. If you were to get lost, you’d have to attempt the horror movie trope of pulling over and going to some stranger’s house to ask for directions or ask to use their phone. No one wants to do that in real life.

I am back from Murdery Woods Weekend One: CJ and Kat’s Wedding in the Catskills. The most frightening part of the whole trip ended up being when I just landed a few hours ago and due to the remnants of a cold, couldn’t equalize my ears, giving me that “OMG MY HEAD IS GOING TO EXPLODE” fear.

The wedding venue was in Mount Tremper, outside Kingston, New York. I rode an Amtrak up from the city, right along the Hudson, to get to Albany, which is the closest major city to the venue. Kingston, which was one of the first American settlements by the Dutch, is today blossoming with bearded Brooklynites who have moved in, lots of new artists and music festivals and cool murals on its buildings all over town. I tried the best tamales I’ve eaten in years at the Kingston Farmer’s Market downtown on Saturday, er, yesterday. The horchata was not bad, either. Old Friend Reeve, who conveniently moved to Upstate New York LAST WEEK, came through as both a dependable driver/wedding date (since Justin was unavailable). I enjoyed spending our car time together hearing his strong, highly specific opinions again, like the good ol days when we set out to run three miles but accidentally ran six because we were too busy making wisecracks the whole time.

Anyway. We got sublimely photo-bombed by a New York Assemblyman who was so expert at photobombing that by the time we noticed it happened, he was gone. Poof!

New York Assemblyman Kevin Cahill is the most natural, stealthy photobomber of all time.

Kat is the little sister I never had, or my fourth daughter who I’d be biologically incapable of having, depending on who is making the reference. That she is marrying/married her love of many years, CJ, who makes her feel so supported and encouraged all the time, made all of us cry happy tears during the whole ceremony. The ceremony you will not see in photos (see above).

Saturday afternoon, Reeve and I took the Clinton “Peg Leg” Bates Memorial Highway out to the mountain house where all this was going down. “Bet he never thought he’d have a highway named after him,” Reeve said.

Cocktail hour

Besides all the love in the air, the occasion also allowed for my favorite thing about weddings, which is reuniting with old friends and meeting new, interesting people. (My next favorite thing is messing with strangers by pretending to have a totally different identity.) My bestie Matt Thompson and his bear beau Bryan drove up from DC, we made inappropriate jokes the entire time we were together and ate a lot of food. “We are very food oriented people,” Reeve had to explain to someone in CJ’s family who couldn’t understand all my strategic positioning for the doughnuts.

By the time I was halfway home today from the other coast (I do enjoy the East coast, just not living there), I had a message from Matty saying, “I am going to murder the children. They are demons.” So it turns out the closest thing anyone came murder this weekend was not in the woods, but back in LA in my own home.

Home from 26 hours in DC, 36 hours in New York and 48 hours in LA. I needed to go home to the US for face-to-face work meetings about my “future,” since our time in Seoul is going to come to an end at one point or another. This trip did not include nearly enough sleep but it was rad because so many inspiring friends are in America! Our conversations over meals and drinks were the kind I like the most — the ones you need to make footnotes for so you can check back later. Here are some of the people from the week, and the links and culture they shared:

Friend Tim
Tim made five flight connections and took a sad bus in the snow — NEVER GIVING UP — in order to get to my Amsterdam nuptials, so, obviously, he’s a generous friend. Despite our close bond, we hadn’t seen each other in person since 2014, when I ran into him at Lambert St. Louis Airport after I almost got shot in Ferguson. Tim has moved to LA. He got there like, last week. So for my last night in America I went to Tim and his wife Rachel’s, where we sat amidst stacks of unopened boxes of their stuff to eat tacos and Salt and Straw ice cream. Tim and Rachel recommended the writer Mary Choi and her new YA novel, which is debuting this week. “She’s the voiciest writer I have ever known,” he said. When Tim was design director at WIRED he brought on Mary to do a column, which she rocked.

Friend Matt
Matt Thompson is a constant character in my life and on this blog because the man is a goddamned inspiration. We snuck in a meal together in DC before I had to go and he was most excited about this data viz on economic mobility from The New York Times, which so painfully and clearly illustrates what is happening to even wealthy black men in this country.

Girls Night: Kat/Pamela/Alex/Claire
Claire is the brain behind Elise Tries, my goofy East Asia-inspired video series. On the same day as we found out some great (embargoed) news about the series, I had plans for drinks and food with Claire and the other aforementioned girls, in New York. A Noreaster came in and lots of them didn’t have to go to work, so they came down to hang and catch up over takeout and wine. Among the recs: Alex recommends traveling with backpackers in Vietnam, which she just did after a grueling time at the Olympics. Kat can’t stop raving about Rachel Khong’s book Goodbye, Vitamin, which I ended up reading on the plane and love, love, loved.

Friend Alec
Alec is either a creative genius or a smug asshole, depending on whom you ask. The person who calls him a smug asshole is TJ Miller, who played “Erlich” on Friend Alec’s television show, Silicon Valley. It’s a long story. I met Alec before the show premiered in 2014, after HBO turned down my request to interview Mike Judge and offered Alec instead. True story – Friday was only the second time I’d ever hung out with Alec but he says he meets a lot of people who are dumb-dumbs on press tours so he was able to glean that I at least was not a dumb-dumb (low bar), and we’ve kept in touch ever since. I revealed I’ve been despairing about all the news and he recommended a twitter feed called @humanprogress, which is full of positive stats about how much more educated and well-fed and resourced the world is today than it was before. He also recommends his new show, Barry, which he created with Bill Hader. It came out this weekend on HBO. Obviously he’s biased, but non-Alec-affiliated people have given it positive reviews. Also, for the record, my take is that Alec is NOT an asshole!

Friend Reeve meets baby Thomas, one of many babies born since I’ve been gone.

My experiences during short bursts of time in the states are reliably memorable because they are so abbreviated, and therefore I have to really make the most of every moment. In my downtime I a.) kept going to the Au Bon Pain next to my DC hotel to get giant iced teas and breakfast sandwiches and b.) watched some domestic cable news, which let’s face it, is pretty terrifying these days. The programming is interrupted by catheter and other medical device commercials, which are clues I should not be watching.

Highlights that I can piece together through the jet lag:

The Washington Half

Finally visited the Blacksonian — the new Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture — on the day I landed in DC. Eyes still bloodshot from the flight and jet lag setting in, Matt Thompson, his partner Bryan and I powered through and saw crazy amazing stuff like the Parliament Funkadelic MOTHERSHIP. Yes, yes we did.

Friend Claire came down from New York for a hang. We lingered over a three and a half hour dinner at a mezcal place, not because of the meal but because we had some epic catching up to do.

With one of the greats, Don Gonyea, at NPR HQ.

Don Gonyea gave me advice about work and life, which is always much appreciated.

Hanson, you know, of mmmmbop fame from 20 years ago, played a Tiny Desk Concert on the first day I went back to work in DC. They actually played two, because they recorded their very special Christmas Tiny Desk, too. Taylor (the middle one) and I joked around a bit about how the dinosaur on his Christmas sweater was wearing the same sweater, creating some sort of ugly Christmas sweater matrix.

One of my ex-work spouses, Javaun, took a train up from Lynchburg (where he now lives) to spend Tuesday evening hanging out and eating barbecue and drinking beers together. I can’t even remember all the ground we covered because, beer.

Finally ate at the State Department cafeteria in Foggy Bottom — a bucket list item.

Because I am support the notion of spending money to save time, I hired April Yvonne, friend of my always glam friend Angie Goff, to shop for me. She picked out racks of clothes in a few Georgetown shops in advance, so all I had to do was try things on and make decisions. The whole excursion only took two hours in total and I was hella wardrobed for the weekend and work by the end. Endorse.

The Austin Half

Met the following babies who have joined us since I’d last been in Austin: Baby Adaline. Baby Thomas. Baby Marcella. Baby EJ. Baby Franklin. Toddler Hattie. Toddler Emma. Missed Baby Sam, who is fattening up in a NICU right now, but boy was I overjoyed to see his parents.

Sam’s dad Jimmy is my ultimate favorite eating partner. He also cooks delicious food and personally catered my engagement party with Spanish tapas since he trained to be a chef in the kitchens of Spain and Charleston, SC. Because of serendipity, the weekend I was in Austin was also the Far East Food Festival, in which some sixty Austin restaurants served up healthy portions of various Asian creations and Jimmy was judging the food. He added me as a judge so we CHOWED DOWN until the heat and the food consumption did us in. I had to quit early because I just couldn’t eat anymore. Embarrassing, but true.

Fried kimchi rice balls at Far East Food Fest

Due to the abbreviated time, there were extra meals sandwiched in. On Friday I had a cheeseburger appetizer at P Terry’s while en route to Cooper’s barbecue where we disappeared pounds of brisket, sausage and ribs plus jalapeno mac-and-cheese, potato salad and the standard vat of pickles plus white bread. (Also Cooper’s offers free beans!) This was my favorite meal because of the strong appetizer IN THE CAR ON THE WAY to BBQ and my reliable eating buddies, Blake and Justin, joined to work up some serious meat sweats. I probably could have recovered for third lunch after this but we had do disperse.

Reunited with the dim sum club on Saturday morning to eat our faces off.

Did not see my oracle, Harry Whittington (the guy Dick Cheney accidentally shot in the face) but did see Bachelor Brad, who we seem to run into in Austin pretty much all the time. Is he everywhere? Is it because he’s a twin?

Surprised my goddaughter Marion Cass at her school, which led to second graders drawing me a bunch of butterflies and teaching me how to play a game called Sleeping Queen (need to get this for my daughters). Marion Cass also had me over to her house Sunday afternoon where she showed me how she can do things like SPLITS IN THE AIR because, gymnastics and being seven.

The purpose of this Austin return was to attend Friend Todd’s wedding. Did it, and so glad, because I love weddings! I also get to take partial credit for this union in the butterfly-flaps-its-wings kind of way, because I brought Todd to the Texas Tribune in 2009 as we were starting it. Here’s what happened: He was a weirdo who was teaching me Final Cut Pro as a part of a class I took at Austin Film School. I decided he was adorable even though I’m pretty sure he didn’t wash his hair at the time and was always railing about the dangers of aspartame and fluoride. Started calling him Hot Toddy behind his back (he later confronted me about this and yep, guilty) and convinced our boss Evan to give him a job at the Tribune because we were in wild wild west days of throwing jobs around. It was through this job that he met Carsi, his bride.

Reeve and I ran the hike and bike trail and joked around the whole time, just like the good ol’ days.

Sent up a flare in DC, and again in Austin, for big group happy hours. Both led to the happiest reunions, predictably. In Austin, April, my BFF from those halcyon days of my partying/Texas lege-covering twenties in Austin, HAPPENED to also be back after moving away to Toronto a few years ago. We got to see each other for about twenty minutes. I’ll take it.

The last time I was in America, I was two people. This time it was just me and my pump, which had to be used every few hours for the duration of the nine-day trip, the bottles and bags of expressed milk piling up in my respective hotel freezers until I had so much that I paid $400 in heavy baggage fees to bring all that liquid gold home. In order to keep it frozen while flying, I snuck in a trip to Ace Hardware in DC and got a giant padded cooler bag, which ended up being perfect. Thanks, Ace Hardware.

I believe it is the great American sage called Oprah who preaches the mantra of living your best life. And if I recall correctly, to live your best life you should be grateful for all the love and kindness and free food that come your way. (Or something along those lines. I don’t watch Oprah but have read a few of her magazines while out by the pool.)

So today in my Oprah-brand “Gratitude Journal” I’d be grateful for my work cousin/guide/bestie Matt Thompson, who, after my $20 bill went flying into 5th Street NW, heroically jumped over a spiky four foot fence that enclosed us into a bar patio before running partially into the street, chasing the airborne Andrew Jackson until he was able to retrieve it in front of cheering bystanders. Thank you Matt, and thank you fellow fence jumper meandering dollar-chaser Patrick for bearing witness to this for the historical record (as I couldn’t scale a fence on a windy day in a loose skirt).

Some great thinkers in media are leading what I’ll call the “context movement”, a push toward giving audiences more satisfying, better understanding of the worlds in which they live instead of simply presenting ephemeral, episodic stories as journalists always have. As the daughter of immigrants, helping provide better entry points for news is near and dear to me. I’m also a fervent believer in this because Texas Tribune founder John Thornton imagined the TT as an attempt to do what the movement talks about — provide knowledge, not news.

I first heard Matt Thompson talk about context at the 2008 Reynolds Journalism Institute dedication at the Missouri School of Journalism (Go Tigers). The principle then became crystallized when Thornton said the context void inspired him to start the Tribune. We have some great examples of projects that move toward that goal, but after this morning’s panel I feel an even stronger need to try and rethink what we prioritize, how we organize information, and how we share it. If you missed the panel, I’ll try my best to provide some Cliff’s Notes. The conversation is continuing online, so please weigh in in this space or at the Future of News site if you’re interested.

We receive more information than ever, and a lot of it is ambient and unsatisfying. Take health care reform as an example. “Most of the news is ‘episodic’,” says Thompson. You hear a little about the excise tax, Stupak, reconciliation… the torrent of information is hard to keep track of. Then, new torrents of headlines come at us all the time. We ASSUME that over time this will cohere into real knowledge. Eventually you hear enough about public option that you understand a little. Mounting evidence indicates that when you’re faced an ever growing flood of headlines it’s not useful.

“Suppose your laptop continually received new updates that you didn’t have software for,” Jay Rosen said. News is much the same way; designed to provide constant updates to a larger narrative that doesn’t exist or isn’t currently provided by news producers. Audiences actually need systemic, not episodic information. Need an intellectual framework for episodic news to make any sense.

Incidentally, systemic knowledge (Wikipedia entries, “Top 10 things you need to know about [blank]”) is actually easier to provide than the episodic stuff. One news organization boiled down every health care system in the world into four types. That helped people understand what we have in U.S. and what we want to change it into. If you look at health care on a broader level, you can distill it so it’s more understandable. We need an intellectual framework for themes and situations and debates in the news. That’s what context means.

WHY CURRENT NEWS FORMS LACK CONTEXT

The current news system is an artifact of an earlier era of industrial production that has passed. But the web allows us to fix some of the problems.

Because journalism is structured around the single story, it’s not accommodating to help people have more meaning, more context. But that’s a function of the old ecosystem. In prior platforms, we couldn’t give background due to limits on time or space. So we learned to produce news with updates. The ecosystem was not conducive because reporters were producing for primary time-specific models.

There’s also very little reward for providing context if you’re a journalist. News reporters see it as doing something “extra”, providing “more info”, instead of making the background – the topic page or whatever you want to call it – the main draw and the incremental stories the side dishes. The journalism system – newsrooms, reporters – compete not to equip readers with more understanding but to break news. Metrics on “success” as organizations are also skewed because they measure how many people watched, how many clicked, not more understanding.

Also, as reporters become experts, they begin to ID with most sophisticated users on their beats and then lose contact with people who are still starting out with a subject or entering late.

“EPISODIC NEWS” DOES NOT FIT OUR TIME, OR OUR TECHNOLOGY

“Episodic news is bass ackward,” Thompson says. As reporters, we map out our beats, we actually understand issues systemically so we know what’s important. Then we dribble out all we know in stingy little bits (news stories). We do this bc audiences still read these episodic bits. But also because we were bounded by old media platforms. Newspapers and broadcasts were bound by time. Newspapers had to expire, and broadcasts were here now and then gone later.

For first time we have a medium that’s capable of supporting systemic and episodic information at one time. We’re not constrained by time.

WHAT ATTEMPTS AT CONTEXT LOOK LIKE NOW

The “nut grafs” are the most common attempts at context in mainstream news right now, and it’s largely a product of the old page-based models of news (there’s only so much room to fit in the background info, so let’s wedge it in.) The result is a sprinkle of systemic information stuffed into our episodic stories. In the health care example, it might be a paragraph explaining what reconciliation is in the middle of an episodic story about the latest tussle of the House and Senate bills.

Other news organizations are providing topics pages (the TT has more than 250 of them plus extensive candidate and elected officials directories). Thompson argues this is still not the best way to do it because most topics pages are largely automated collections of links that still don’t put all those links into context. Google’s tried to automate contextual information with Living Stories and it’s proven how hard it is.

“I worry that our approach to providing context is mirroring on the web how it looked in other media [and not optimized for the web],” said Thompson.

CONTEXT WORKS

Systemic organization of news benefits the reader, but also benefits producers of information. Your information becomes more valuable, desirable and useful as your desire for a framework becomes stronger. For example, This American Life’s “Giant Pool of Money” episode dared to start at a very basic level and explain the global financial meltdown in a way people could understand.

Journalists who did the Giant Pool of Money project were also confused when they started, then went on a journey of discovery. The people involved with financial systems did the explaining, and the journalists connected that explanation into a way that made sense. Afterward, it makes following the financial crisis with far more ease. If you understand the background, it helps you better understand the experience. Enriches you overall.

The web also rewards news providers who provide context. People are far more likely to re-visit the wikipedia page or the topics overview a year after a news event. Thompson’s “The Money Meltdown” site pulled together the best links to explain the financial crisis. Matt posted it on his blog and in one month, 50,000 unique visitors came along and looked at it 75,000 times. It speaks to a desire. It’s all about pulling together links, in some cases. What’s difficult right now is automating it. Link barns as topic pages aren’t working.

If you imagine reorienting staff around creating context as is rewarded by wikipedia, the web is set up to reward it, so what are we waiting for?

CURRENT PROBLEMS WITH CONTEXT

Lack of perceived demand. What good is a long explainer on something when no one is requesting the explainer genre? Rosen’s test-driving ExplainThis.org, allowing people to “demand” what they want to know that journalists can help respond to. “The press does not belong to professionals in journalism. It’s ours,” says Rosen. ” The more people who participate in the press, the stronger the press will be. But professional journalism was never optimized for public participation, it was optimized for efficiency on the old platforms.”

HOW TO ACHIEVE CONTEXT?

Wikipedia specializes in background knowledge. NYTimes specializes in investigations and updates. Why are they separate services? Why aren’t they the same? It makes more sense to provide context just as you’re coming into a story halfway through its development, like the health care debate.

Wikipedia is structually inspiring to us. Instead of bifurcating the story into a bunch of components, Wikipedia was pulling information together. Wiki works really well over time. It’s often the first choice people go to for news a year after something’s been in the headlines. Currently we present it as “more information”. The consumer doesn’t necessarily want “more information”. We want to present the minimum you need to understand a subject, and then develop that as your need for more increases.

As you read earlier, topics pages presented as “extra information” are the new vogue. Where context peddlers want to head is actually flipping the model. The context should be the foundation. The systemic stuff should be what you can access first. The episodic stuff is what should be the more info. We “ghettoize” topics pages on our sites, by creating a topics section. When the public just finds just a random collection of links on a so-called topics page, “the quest for context everywhere is set back,” Thompson argues. What would a site look like if it were structured around systems instead of stories? The essential stuff is what you need to know is first, and as your knowledge expanded you got day-to-day headlines.

Journalists may think, we’re doing so much and now you want to provide context!? Think like an engineer. Make it an imperative to do work you can re-use to provide context. You can use that subduction plates info graphic again and again with every story you write about earthquakes. It’s redefining the notion of “today” value. You’re writing something TODAY that’s only appending something that’s already valuable. Engineers don’t do work they can’t re-use. Do work you can use next time.

If we reorganize the telling of stories around a quest for clarity and beat reporters weren’t just covering their beats but revealing something we need to know, and we saw news coverage not as series of updates but as a giant story, that would be on the way to where we want to get.

CALL TO ACTION

Our imperative as journalists is that we understand this systemic framework ourselves. We should devote as much value to expertise as we do to the latest news. We should also sell and market context. What happened five minutes ago is great, but “10 things you need to know about health care” is more useful. We need journalists thinking that way more commonly. As participants in the news system, we need to demand that. We should say, we don’t understand this topic. Build stuff on your own for topics you don’t understand. Find the best links, pull them together. The web rewards context. The pieces that provide it become seminal pieces rewarded by search engines over time. Start with the users and their need to participate in the news and have a handle on the world.

Thanks for the great panel, guys. I hope this summed things up okay. Let’s keep the conversation going.